Drupal Mavens Unveil Open Atrium: An Intranet in a Box

Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today,Development Seed, the open source shop behind DrupalCon in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of Open Atrium.

Open Atrium is a free and open source intranet built as a Drupal distribution, with some impressive functionality available out of the box. Not only is this a solid piece of software to begin with, but its makers are evangelizing what they think could be a transformative paradigm for extending Drupal’s capabilities.

Development Seed has been around for about six years, and in that time they’ve built Drupal-based websites and intranets for the likes of the UN and the World Bank, among many others. Eventually they thought to themselves, why not put together this intranet as a separate distribution? Something extensible that could be deployed at lightning speed?

Enter Open Atrium.

In addition to being a well-constructed Drupal distro, the software is neatly packaged with an array of useful features for internal collaboration. There are blogs, wikis, a calendar, to-do lists, a ticketing system, and a microblogging tool called the Shoutbox. To aggregate the activity from these various parts, there’s a group dashboard.

Oh, and did I mention that it is multilingual too? As a team that first met while working together in Peru, internationalism is a big goal for Atrium. To my knowledge, the only mature intranet to seriously support both English and other tongues is ThoughtFarmer. (Canadians and their French, eh?)

In addition to the built-in functionality, developers can create their own features with relative ease. These features are not just new aspects to the software, but are actually a kind of meta-module, as described by Eric Gundersen of Development Seed in a phone conversation with ReadWriteWeb.

Feature can be released on their own basis or served through a dedicated features server. The real goal behind them is to “make niche [use cases] work,” according to Gundersen. With virtually any features addition to Atrium able to be shared with others, Development Seed hopes that a healthy App Store-like ecosystem will develop that can “turn this in to an exciting business model” for themselves and other developers.

Speaking with Gundersen, you can tell Development Seed has a serious expertise and passion for open source development, and it really shows in Open Atrium. It may not integrate with your legacy apps or be offered by a big enterprise vendor, but from where we’re sitting Open Atrium stacks up very well compared to any proprietary intranet software.

Google Calendar Adds Labs and Opens Up An API

Google Calendar now has its own Labs. Long one of the most popular features of Gmail, at least among the early adopter crowd, Labs is the tab in Settings where users can find and turn on experimental new features. Google Calendar Labs is launching with six features:

1. Background Image (now you can change it)
2. Attach a Document (to an event)
3. World Clock (see what time it is for the person you are trying to schedule a meeting with across the world)
4. Jump To Date (quick time-based navigation)
5. Next Meeting (shows how much time is left before your next one)
6. Free or Busy (shows the status if your friends and co-workers)

If you don’t yet see the Labs setting, it should be rolling out gradually across all Google Calendar users.

In conjunction with the rollout of Google Calendar Labs, Google is also opening up new APIs for developers to change the Google Calendar interface. Google Calendar can act as a gadget container complete with hooks into OpenSocial apps and OAuth authentication, or apps can be written as new sidebar features. The new Labs features were written using the gadget API. Maybe someone will write a Google Calendar app like Facebook events which makes it easy to organize and add events to your calendar directly from Gmail, or better yet, Facebook.

What new features would you like to see come out of Google Calendar Labs?

Living with a first-person shooter disease

1900 MIT courses online for free

Would you like to start studing something?
Well we are now in the collaborative era. Wikipedia, Linux, blogger, etc…

Education should be free. This is MIT contribution:

ocw.mit.edu

Mathematical logic

What Makes 100%?
What does it mean to give MORE than 100%?
Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%?

We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%.
How about achieving 103%?
What makes up 100% in life?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:
H-A -R -D-W-O -R -K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and
K -N -O -W-L -E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5= 96%

But,
A-T -T -I -T -U -D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,
B -U -L -L -S -H-I -T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.
A-S -S -K -I -S-S -I -N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7= 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty, that While Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, its the Bullshit and Ass kissing that will put you over the top.

The Four Essential Apps for Distributed Teams

Distributed teams. Virtual work. Placeless offices. Whatever you want to call them, groups who work from geographically separate locations are more common than ever.

Despite how widespread this mode of coordinating work has become, there are those still wondering just what tools are absolutely crucial to making a distributed team work. Here’s a list of the four types of applications you’ll need, and some examples of the popular places to get them.

One: IM & Chat

Instant messaging and chat are one item, practically speaking, but they tend to serve different, equally-important social functions in the enterprise.

One-to-one IM is the best way to ping your virtual coworkers, and is really the only app that comes close to the easy access you’d get from collocation. Cross-platform apps like Adium and Pidginare extremely popular, in addition to utilities packaged with whatever OS you work from. Enterprise instant messaging services like Microsoft Office Communications Server and Lotus Sametime have been around since the late 90s.

Group chat is slightly less common a need than IM, and is less useful for informal access in your daily workflows. But for certain use cases, only group chat will do. Skype and Campfire from 37Signals can’t be beat from our perspective, though there are enterprise-specific options out there. If you’re looking for a network that’s dead reliable, you could go old school and opt for an IRC channel.

Two: Wiki

We pointedly chose not to mention the generalized notion of a “knowledge base” or document repository. A fully-collaborative space for documents is a necessity, not an experimental accessory to your tool set. What’s more, wikis are by-and-large either free or relatively cheap.

In terms of getting one, wikis offer some of the most diverse (and confusing) options out there. You can get free software like MediaWiki or DokuWiki. You could also go with a hosted provider such as PBworks, Wikispaces, Zoho Wiki or EditMe. Options for the enterprise often do a lot more than just wiki besides, and the leaders in that sense include Confluence, Mindtouch, Socialtext, and XWiki.

Three: Task Tracking

By task tracking, we mean any tool that exists to keep track of the group’s work. These can be issue trackers like JIRA, Trac, or Redmine. For those less-development oriented, it might be something tailored only to project management, like Basecamp, LiquidPlanner, or the offerings from Microsoft and Oracle. 

Four: Web Conferencing

Web conferencing is the most formal of these four applications. It might seem like a fairly dull use of the Web to be conducting meetings over it, but often as not it’s the only application to come close to replacing face-to-face meetings.

If you’re looking for full video and audio capabilities, conferencing is the most resource-heavy of the quartet, which is why there are more options available from big vendors. The most popular these days include: WebEx from Cisco, GoToMeeting, and Adobe Connect.

Powerpoint? Keynote? nope, Prezi

Prezi allows anyone who can sketch an idea on a napkin to create and perform stunning non-linear presentations with relations, zooming into details, and adjusting to the time left without the need to skip slides.

The ideology of Prezi is based our natural knowledge on how to coordinate ourselves in space; traditionally all information we have had to process and store used to be linked to physical space. That is where our minds have developed good skills in orienting ourselves. Despite all this digital information today is mostly presented to us as a moniker of printed matter. Of course printing has served us well to store (and shape) information for the the last six centuries, however, with the wide appearance of computing we saw the same old pattern: old forms got translated to new media without exploring its full potential. Most of the computer systems which present us with information today use the old paradigm of prints and slides: arranging information on a framed 2d static space. We could argue that these (at least their forms) are merely the side effect of Gutenberg’s galaxy.

The real Michael Jackson

Living with Michael Jackson

Spinning baseball bat trick

A normal day 2

Update Google calendar with twitter

You can connect your Twitter account and your Google Calendar to add events to your calendar by Direct Message. It’s like having a personal assistant!

Step 1: Follow the instructions at Twittercal.com to get set up
Step 2: Send a Direct Message to gcal to enter a new calendar appointment. Example: “D gcal meeting with John P at Twisted Root on Saturday July 10 at 1:00 PM”

2012: It’s a Disaster

Location Now Built into Google Maps using Chrome and Firefox

With many of us using smartphones with GPS now, we’re starting to take for granted applications like Google Maps being able to pinpoint us. But using computer is a different story. Sure, there have been plugins, and things like Google Toolbar, but those are things that most people aren’t going to bother to install. But starting today, location is now built in to Google Maps in the browser — provided you’re using the right browser.

If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your locati

Forvo: the pronunciation guide. All the words in the world pronounced by native speakers

Forvo: the pronunciation guide. All the words in the world pronounced by native speakers.

Facebook Makes Spontaneous Event Planning Easier

Facebook has updated its publisher tool to allow users to create events directly through the Publisher. After clicking on the “Events” icon, you can enter information about what the event is and where and when you want to meet.

You can invite friends published event that’s created either on your profile or your news feed by selecting the “Invite guests” link to share the event with friends. Facebook says that the advantage of using the new event tool over just listing an event through a status update is the ability for friends to RSVP immediately when the event pops up in their news feeds. Plus, Facebook says that the new tool allows gives you the best of both worlds—the ability to use features of the Events application while still publishing the event in the news feed.

Of course, this means that if you create an event through publisher, it will make the event fairly open to your friends, who can also invite other friends. It doesn’t seem to be designed to be used for events that are meant for a select few of your friends. Facebook says that you can edit your event from the actual events application to change access, but that cannot be done within publisher.